When will the TalkTalk mailbox option be available again ?

[Kerrchill]

Screen shows temporarily unavailable but this has been going on so long ! Come on TalkTalk sort it out.

[Gondola]

TalkTalk say here that the current email service is free to broadband and fibre customers. TalkTalk have to pay Open Xchange the mail service provider for each mailbox so there is a cost to TalkTalk in offering 'free' email. You are quite right to accept that email is not really free when it's part of a broadband package and does come at a cost.

There are free email services from the likes of Outlook.com, Gmail and Yahoo Mail etc. But as I'm suggesting to you, 'free' always comes at a cost.

[dismaid]

Thanks for the update, and the info on current email providers.  I did not know that things had disintegrated to such an extent.

Let's be clear about one thing.  I don't consider the email to be free.   The email service with five boxes was a selling point of the package that I was originally offered at an inclusive price.

TalkTalk should simply state that they are restricting some aspects of the email facilities pending winding down or migration to another platform or similar if that is what they are doing.  I doubt that anybody still believes the excuse ' we have temporarily removed the create/delete mailbox functionality as we are performing some backend maintenance work on our email platform'.   6 months of backend maintenance and still no result - not believable.

[Gondola]

I think you need to be made aware that the main ISP's do not offer email to new customers. Not any of the BT group (including EE and Plusnet), not Sky or Now, not Vodafone, not Virgin Media O2 (prospective purchaser of TalkTalk Consumer) not Shell broadband (customers sold to TalkTalk) and there's a slew of email services from Tesco, Easynet, John Lewis group, Co-Op Broadband etc that have also ceased.

Those ISP's that do offer good email services include Zen Internet and Aquiss. Or there are plenty of good paid for email services independent of any ISP.

The thing is that providing email services costs money. So the big ISP's have cut their overhead costs by cutting out 'free' email. I suggest that to Virgin Media O2 the provision of 'free' email is not an asset it's a legacy liability. 

NB Heads up that TalkTalk Customer Services are not permitted to delete any email address and will not do so. This act must be carried out only by the TalkTalk Data Protection team after positive verification of the registered email user.

[dismaid]

Thanks Gondola for your prompt response. 

I have had a long discussion with one of the management people about the inability of customers to manage email boxes online, and was given the same old excuse that they have been putting out since last August, i.e., that it is a technical issue and they are working on it.

I made it quite plain that in my opionion they are clearly not working on it, and its about time they stoppped pedalling that unbelievable excuse.   Furthermore the current owners don't seem to have sufficient business sense to realise that this lack of attention to a facility that, as far as I remember, was part of the package I signed up to is devaluing the company that the owners are apparently trying to sell at a profit.  It's a small point in the greater scheme of things, but in my opinion it indicates a attitude that customers and purchasers of the business should be aware of.

I did contact customer services and was told that they can delete an email box by request, but it is no longer possible to replace it with a new one.  So I am now looking for new ISP - any recommendations, apart from the international providers who I feel have little genuine regard for privacy ?

[Gondola]

TalkTalk Consumer is already up for sale by the private equity owners that hope to profit from the breakup of TalkTalk Group and sale of its now separate divisions. The newspapers report that Virgin Media O2 are bidding, again.

User deletion of mailbox email addresses may not be currently possible in these circumstances but you can give instructions for mailbox deletion to the TalkTalk Data Protection Office team. Bear in mind that this team work office hours only.

See the GDPR help page item  'Your Right to be Forgotten / Right to Erasure '. There's a postal address, which in my view is the best way to contact the Data Protection team, but you can initiate a contact via any of the TalkTalk contact methods.

 LiveChat and TalkTalk contact information

 When to contact TalkTalk? - select and scroll to see contact availability times

TIP - Pause tracker blocking in the browser, ad-blockers and similar blocking software to avoid conflict with the operation of chat messaging.

Landline calls to Customer Services on 0345 172 0088 are free from a TalkTalk home 'phone but otherwise are at a standard landline call rate.

Mobile calls to Customer Services on 0203 441 5550. Text Relay Service is 18001 then 0345 172 0088.

[dismaid]

What if TalkTalk act responsibly and provide the service they originally offered.  Withdrawing it surreptitiously like this decreases conficence in the organisation and is the sort of thing that will lead eventually to TT being taken over.

OK - so what is the phone number of the Data Protection Team.  TalkTalk is a telephone company without a telephone, it seems.

[Gondola]

What if TalkTalk are going to charge for mailbox addresses in future? Or TalkTalk is bought by a company that does not offer email to new customers? Or the TalkTalk budget for Mail cannot be increased? (More mailboxes mean more outgoing costs month on month) Can you think of more reasons for TalkTalk not reinstating the ability for users to create new mailbox addresses?

Apart from the inability to create new mailbox addresses the deletion of existing mailbox addresses can be carried out by the TalkTalk Data Protection team.

And if you want a new email address there are free services from outlook.com, Gmail and Yahoo Mail and several excellent paid for services.